The Internet is a global network of computer systems and websites. These computer systems include a variety of documents, files, databases, and the like, which include information covering a variety of topics. It can be difficult for users of the Internet to locate this information on the Internet.
Search engines are used by most people to locate this information on the Internet. The websites and computer systems have mechanisms for describing the content of their websites and computer systems, which are used by these search engines to help users to locate the information on the Internet. Well known mechanisms for describing content of sources and web services, such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL; http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/Note-wsdl-20010315), DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML; http://www.daml.org), Ontology Web Language—Services (OWL-S; http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/#s 1.2), Language for Advertisement and Request for Knowledge Sharing (LARKS), and ontology builders, such as description logics, Database Query Language (DQL) and Resource Description Framework (RDF), are very complex and their documentation (W3C) runs into hundreds of pages. Querying these formal descriptions requires sophisticated extensions to Structured Query Language (SQL) (like Requirements Query Language (RQL)). However, these formalisms limit the searchability of the descriptions by search engines.
Users typically enter key words into the search forms of the search engine. The search engine then executes the search and provides a result of the search. For the most part, the result of the search is a list of hyperlinks to various websites having the desired information. A summary of information may also be provided on a results page. However, the results page often includes irrelevant results. In particular, if a user is looking for detailed information in a particular area, they may have a difficult time framing their search to find results that match their search criteria.